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David Cage on grief, life, death, game design & Beyond: Two Souls

Keith Stuart: The writer and director of the Quantic Dreams game Heavy Rain tells us about his new title, Beyond: Two Souls, and why games have much to tell us about life and death…

Video games have a strange relationship with death. It happens all the time, of course – a thousand times a second in one of the big online shooters. Death is part of the language, the very fibre of game design.

But yet, games rarely question it, rarely confront it. While movies and literature have pored over its implications, its finality (or otherwise), games have been content to use it as a penalty, or a dramatic plot device in a cinematic sequence.

Some titles, such as the Soul Reaver series have attempted to explore the duality of the physical and spiritual worlds, while ethereal adventures like Shadow of the Colossus and Limbo have dealt with notions of post-mortal guilt and purgatory. But mostly, death is just a glyph in the gaming grammar, a means of progressing from one game state to another.

Beyond: Two Souls could be very different. The latest adventure from Quantic Dreams, the developer of last year’s controversial thriller Heavy Rain, follows Jodie Holmes, a young girl with psychic abilities and a close, symbiotic relationship with a spectral being named Aidan…